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Smart Interface Design Patterns In Your Pocket: Checklist Cards PDF

Vitaly Friedman

2020-08-04T14:00:00+00:00 2020-08-04T15:07:37+00:00

Every UI component, no matter if it’s an accordion, a hamburger navigation, a data table, or a carousel, brings along its unique challenges. Coming up with a new solution for every problem takes time, and often it’s really not necessary. We can rely on smart design patterns and usability tests, and ask the right questions ahead of time to avoid issues down the line.

Meet "Smart Interface Design Checklists", with questions to ask when designing and building any interface component.

Meet Interface Design Patterns Checklists, a deck of 100 cards with common questions to ask while dealing with any interface challenge — from intricate data tables and web forms to troublesome hamburgers and carousels. Plus, many other components (full list ↓), explored in full detail.

Each checklist has been curated and refined for years by yours truly — all based upon usability sessions, design iterations and A/B tests. Useful for designers & front-end developers to discuss everything a component requires before starting designing or coding.

And if you’d like to dive into design patterns live, attend our upcoming online workshops on Smart Interface Design Patterns, 2020 Edition, where we’ll explore 100s of practical examples over 5×2.5h live sessions.

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Vitaly’s 5×2.5h online workshop, with the checklists PDF, live sessions and examples.

Checklists PDF Deck

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Free! Get Checklists PDF

DRM-free, of course. PDF. Included with Smashing Membership.

Get the eBook

Download PDF. Thanks for being smashing! ❤️

About The Checklists

Meet 100 checklist cards with everything you need to tackle any UI challenge — from intricate tables to troublesome carousels. Created to help us all keep track of all the fine little details to design and build better interfaces, faster. Plus, it's useful to not forget anything critical and avoid costly mistakes down the line. Check the preview.

When working on pretty much any interface problem, we sit down with designers and developers and talk about its design, markup and behavior — using checklists. The deck creates a much-needed sense of alignment, so everyone is one the same page before jumping into design or coding tools.

The deck includes checklists on:

designing for touch (free preview),

hamburger menu and accordions,

carousels and navigation,

filtering, sorting, search,

data tables and feature comparison,

pricing plans and product page,

sliders and video players,

configurators and wizards,

date pickers and calendars,

timelines, maps, seating plans,

privacy and authentication,

onboarding and offboarding,

reviews and testimonials,

video and audio players,

web forms and donation forms.

Plus, 400 practical interface examples (free preview).

Beautifully designed by our dear illustrator Ricardo Gimenes, this deck is always by your side — on your desk or on your phone when you’re on the go.

Additionally, you get practical examples, action points and the checklists in a wide resolution (16×9) for reference and presentations.

A little bonus: 400 practical examples, action points and the checklist in 16×9.

You’ll get:

100 checklists cards on everything from carousels to web forms, carefully curated and designed,

Practical examples and action points for your reference in 16×9,

Editable text file to adjust for your needs,

Life-time access to the deck, updated regularly.

Attend online workshop or get the checklist PDF.

Print + eBook

eBook

Workshop + Checklists

Vitaly’s 5×2.5h online workshop, with the checklists PDF, live sessions and examples.

Checklists PDF Deck

{ "sku": "checklist-cards", "type": "E-Book", "price": "10.00", "prices": [{ "amount": "10.00", "currency": "USD" }, { "amount": "10.00", "currency": "EUR" } ] } $ 10.00

Free! Get Checklists PDF

DRM-free, of course. PDF. Included with Smashing Membership.

Get the eBook

Download PDF. Thanks for being smashing! ❤️

Table of Contents

Designing For Touch Checklist

Overall, 26 questions, including:

Input is never precise: are hit targets at least 48×48px?

Can users tap on the same spot to undo actions?

Do we expose critical navigation at the bottom on mobile?

Accordion Checklist

Overall, 14 questions, including:

What icon do we choose to indicate expansion?

Should expanded sections collapse automatically?

Should the user be scrolled automatically when expanded?

Navigation Checklist

Overall, 30 questions, including:

Do drop-downs appear/disappear on hover, tap/click, or both?

Do nav items appear in a full page/partial overlay or slide-in?

Can we split the nav vertically for sub-menus on mobile?

Hamburger Menu Checklist

Overall, 23 questions, including:

Can we avoid a hamburger icon and show navigation as is?

What happens when the user opens both search and hamburger?

Do we expose critical navigation by default on desktop/mobile?

Filtering Checklist

Overall, 25 questions, including:

Do we expose popular or relevant filters by default?

Do we display the number of expected results for each filter?

Do we apply filters automatically or manually on “Apply” button?

Sorting Checklist

Overall, 32 questions, including:

Do we repeat sorting at the bottom of the content list?

Do we include the “Sort by” label separately from the buttons/dropdown?

Does the default sorting reflect the diversity of all major product types?

Search Autocomplete Checklist

Overall, 33 questions, including:

Do we surface frequent hits, popular searches, products or categories at the top of autosuggestions?

On what character do we start displaying autosuggestions?

Do we use a look-ahead pattern for search queries?

Carousels Checklist

Overall, 37 questions, including:

Can we just show a grid of images instead of a carousel?

Is there a way to pause a carousel if it’s auto-rotating?

How do we choose the sequence of slides?

Tables Checklist

Overall, 28 questions, including:

Do we add steppers to navigate through columns or rows predictably?

Do we highlight the cell, row or column on user’s tap/click?

With rows as cards on mobile, do we expose relevant data for comparison?

Pricing Plans Checklist

Overall, 51 questions, including:

How many features do we want to display per plan?

Do we want to allow customers to switch currency (€/$/£)?

Can we avoid requiring credit card data for the free trial period?

Sliders Checklist

Overall, 19 questions, including:

Do we provide a text input fallback for precise input?

Are there any values on a slider that shouldn’t be accepting?

Should users be able to “lock” some values?

Date Pickers Checklist

Overall, 20 questions, including:

What presets (‘prev day’/’current day’) do we need for faster navigation?

Do we use dots color coding for different rates or days?

How do we avoid displaying unavailable dates or zero-results?

Configurators Checklist

Overall, 33 questions, including:

What’s the entry point to the configurator?

Should the user automatically move to the next step when finished?

For every step, do we explain and highlight dependencies?

Feature Comparison Checklist

Overall, 27 questions, including:

Can users see only differences, similarities and selected attributes for all products/plans?

Can the user move columns left and right?

Should we ask customers to choose preferred attributes?

Timelines Checklist

Overall, 24 questions, including:

How do we expose/highlight critical events (e.g. now/coming up next)?

Should some events or time segments be available/fixed at all times?

Do we communicate changes over time with an underlying histogram?

Schedule And Calendars Checklist

Overall, 25 questions, including:

Do we provide quick jumps between tracks?

Should we consider flipping the timing header by 90 degrees?

Do we display what’s happening now and coming up next?

Maps Checklist

Overall, 26 questions, including:

Do we provide zooming? How many levels of depth will zoom provide?

Would an autocomplete search help users find information faster?

For charts, can we flip axis to make use of available space?

Seating Plans Checklist

Overall, 23 questions, including:

What kinds of pricing tiers and discounted tickets (senior, student) do we have?

Do we have any planes or floors that users need to navigate between?

Do we calculate and display an experience score for each seat?

Privacy Checklist

Overall, 44 questions, including:

Can we group user data according to low/medium/high priority?

Can we gradually request more user permissions when we need them?

Do we ask for permissions only if we are likely to get them?

Onboarding Checklist

Overall, 15 questions, including:

Can we avoid intro tours, tooltips, wizards and slideshows as they are usually skipped?

Do we use empty state to indicate our features?

When is the right timing to show a particular feature?

Reviews and Testimonials Checklist

Overall, 36 questions, including:

Can we group testimonials by a feature/impact and highlight them together?

Do we highlight the number of testimonials/reviews prominently?

Do we display name, photo, title, age, location, role, company, brand logo?

Web Forms Checklist

Overall, 76 questions, including:

Will we be using floating labels? If so, are they accessible?

For a country selector, do we display some countries as frequently used?

Do we show the number of errors above the “Submit” button and in the tab title as a prefix?

Donation Form Checklist

Overall, 32 questions, including:

Do we include any testimonials or stories next to the donation form?

What suggested donation amounts do we display, and how many?

Which types of donations do we have: one-off, monthly, quarterly, annually?

Authentication Checklist

Overall, 34 questions, including:

What password requirements do we want/need to implement?

Do we really need CAPTCHA, or can we use honeypot/time traps instead?

Do we limit the frequency of password recovery attempts?

Product Page Checklist

Overall, 76 questions, including:

What layout do we use for the page (tabs, accordions, one long page, floating bar)?

Do we display the final price (incl. standard shipping, taxes, payment fees, currency)?

What do we display when an item is out of stock (notification via SMS/email)?

Video Player Checklist

Overall, 33 questions, including:

How do we optimize for precise input and fast-forwards (keyboard, buttons)?

Do we use preview clips, popularity bar, key moments preview?

Do we persist the position of the video track on refresh?

About the Author

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running front-end/UX workshops and webinars. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems. Get in touch.

“Smart Interface Design Patterns, 2020 Edition”, Online Workshop with Vitaly Friedman (Sep 22 – Oct 6)

Do you want to dive deeper into the bits and pieces of smart interface design patterns? We’ll be hosting a series of online workshops, in which we’ll take a microscopic examination of common interface components and reliable solutions to get them right — both on desktop and on mobile.

We’ll study 100s of hand-picked examples and we’ll design interfaces live, from mega-dropdowns and car configurators — all the way to timelines and onboarding. And: we’ll be reviewing and providing feedback to each other’s work. Check all topics and schedule.

Vitaly's Smart Interface Design Patterns Workshop, broken down into 5×2.5h sessions, with 100s of practical examples.

The workshop is delivered in five 2.5h long sessions with lots of time for you to ask all your questions. It's for interface designers, front-end designers and developers who’d love to be prepared for any challenge coming their way.

You’ll walk away with a toolbox of practical techniques for your product, website, desktop app or a mobile app.

Print + eBook

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Vitaly’s 5×2.5h online workshop, with the checklists PDF, live sessions and examples.

Checklists PDF Deck

{ "sku": "checklist-cards", "type": "E-Book", "price": "10.00", "prices": [{ "amount": "10.00", "currency": "USD" }, { "amount": "10.00", "currency": "EUR" } ] } $ 10.00

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wlreports-blog · 5 years

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Keeping Cool under Pressure

Refrigerated transportation and storage is one of those specialized industrial sectors in which new approaches to strategy and operational excellence can make a huge difference. It’s also an enabler of civilization that nobody notices much – unless they have to live without it. Over the last 20 years, the temperature-controlled logistics sector, as it’s officially called, has quietly but dramatically changed, thanks to three simultaneous global trends. The first is the broadening of nutritional awareness, as people around the world become more accustomed to eating fresh meats, fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and other perishables every day. The second has to do with lengthening food transportation distance. More and more consumers eat food that was sourced thousands of miles away. The third is the changing natural environment. Climate change and pollution, as they affect local agricultural and water supplies, are making society more reliant on diverse sources of fresh food and drink. PwC’s Global CEO Survey: Providing unique insight into the thinking of corporate leaders around the world, PwC’s annual Global CEO Survey covers issues such as the prospects for economic growth, the challenges of building a workforce, the threats facing companies today, and the impact of AI. www.ceosurvey.pwc The technological infrastructure that makes these changes possible is the temperature-controlled supply chain, which dates back about 150 years, to horse-drawn “iceman” carriages. Today’s systems use digitized controls that customize cold temperatures in warehouses and trucks for a wide variety of fresh and frozen foods. Most of this sector has, until recently, been run by small family businesses, but an ongoing wave of consolidation has changed that. Even today, however, gaps remain. Issues of food waste and food shortages are common in all regions, and most of the world is not yet served by truly efficient cold transportation and storage systems. As Lineage Logistics president and chief executive officer Greg Lehmkuhl points out, bringing cooling technology up to global scale could be part of the answer to these issues. Based in Novi, Mich. (a suburb of Detroit), Lineage was launched in 2008 by Bay Grove Capital, a private equity startup founded by two investment bankers, Adam Forste and Kevin Marchetti, seeking enterprises with “lifespans measured in decades, not years,” according to the Bay Grove website. Lineage was the company’s first (and so far only) major venture. It has grown through mergers and acquisitions into a large temperature-controlled warehouse and transportation network, operating in the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Belgium. Lehmkuhl has been CEO of Lineage since July 2015. With a background in the non-temperature-controlled (he calls it “ambient”) logistics industry, he is an advocate for sector-wide coordination in chaotic, multifaceted systems such as food supply chains. He sat down with strategy+business in a PwC office in New York, where we shared the cold comfort of a warm look at this hot business. S+B: How does an underappreciated industry such as temperature-controlled logistics sustain itself and grow? LEHMKUHL: Let me answer that by telling our story. Our founders saw an opportunity to consolidate and innovate a very fragmented industry into an interconnected platform, first in the U.S., and perhaps eventually around the world. When they started, the temperature-controlled logistics sector was largely composed of regional family-owned businesses. But their customers — the groceries and food manufacturers — were merging and growing more global. Food safety was paramount, technology was increasingly digital, and many family-owned businesses couldn’t keep up with the demands of their customers, or didn’t have a new generation of family members who wanted to continue running a cold storage business. So in 2008, Forste and Marchetti bought a single refrigerated warehouse in Seattle. Ten years later, we have 120-plus buildings in four countries, nearly complete supply chain coverage here in the U.S., and a good foothold in Europe. S+B: Was all that growth through acquisition? LEHMKUHL: Most of it was, but went about it in an interesting way. They were very people-oriented — the opposite of the stereotype of ruthless private equity. This is their only platform; 95 percent of their net worth is in temperature-controlled logistics. They always had a long-term vision for the company; they didn’t want to just make money and move on.

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They befriended the Global Cold Chain Alliance, the industry group that all these family-owned businesses belonged to. They got to know the , met the founders, learned what the children and grandchildren were doing, and what their challenges were. Often, what the current owners wanted for the future — having a broader network, more investment in food safety, more investment in the physical infrastructure, expanding their services — would be easier to realize if they joined Lineage. After 10 years, the original owners of these family businesses are still friends of the company. Many are still investors. They still help us, giving us insight into the industry and its interrelationships. We continue to expand both organically and through M&A. That network effect of having 120-plus buildings along with other services — transportation, high-pressure processing, redistribution, manufacturing, and applied sciences and technology — makes us unique. S+B: Your platform does only refrigerated logistics. LEHMKUHL: Correct. It’s a niche segment. We call it temperature control, because it’s sometimes refrigerated, sometimes frozen. The majority of our space is frozen. The regular third-party ambient logistics business is very transactional. In temperature control, I feel like there’s way more trust. The facilities are more capital intensive to build an ordinary ambient warehouse. Customers see our buildings as their buildings, and they get used to the safety of having high-quality infrastructure. Switching providers is an emotional event for them, unlike what I saw on the ambient side before I came to this company. S+B: Who are Lineage’s customers? LEHMKUHL: Our customer base is really the “who’s who” of the food industry. They include the commodity companies, producers of protein, peanuts, fruits and vegetables, and seafood. We also serve food manufacturers, food distributors, retailers, and restaurants. It’s soup to nuts. The manufacturers include a lot of small startups. They have $5 million to $300 million in revenues, and great new fresh or frozen organic products that everybody wants. But they lack scale and sophistication. They need to store their products, and take them to market, in a safe and efficient way. They want a platform to take over all of their distribution: to hire and contract the carriers, and track the product from the farm to the fork. Our bigger customer segment is mainstream food manufacturers. In general, they are under unbelievable pressure. Smaller, innovative startups are taking their shelf space and eroding their margins; white-label supermarket brands are attracting their customers. Many of their traditional big-margin products are losing ground. They desperately need new products, so they are doing a lot of innovation and acquisition. They also need help redesigning their supply chains, for instance, choosing what SKUs to put where, modeling transportation costs, and complying with Walmart’s “on-time and full” requirements . We’re not just a distributor. We’re a platform that pulls together all this transportation and storage, and the data analytics to go with it. S+B: How does e-commerce affect your platform? Do you see food shopping moving online in the same way that shopping for other consumer products did? LEHMKUHL: We do. About 10 percent of consumer goods are purchased through e-commerce now. In food, it’s less than 3 percent, but it’s projected to be 20 percent by 2025. As e-commerce grows, there will be more need for smaller-quantity transactions. Traditionally this industry ran on truckloads of pallets, and now we’re providing individual cases to the retailer or food distributor. Whether the meal-kit idea takes off or doesn’t, we’ll see more and more “each-picks”: sending one yogurt to a consumer rather than 24 of them to a corner store. This shift will require more temperature-controlled warehouses. Prologis has created $10 billion in market value in the last two years, partly because warehousing space is at a premium with e-commerce. Instead of you going to Best Buy to pick out your video game, a warehouse worker grabs it from the shelf for you. S+B: What do you think of refrigerated food delivery into the home – for example, Walmart’s idea of having employees enter customers’ homes to deliver groceries directly into refrigerators, or the “echo fridge” concept, which would be installed on an exterior wall of the kitchen, and could be accessed from both the home’s exterior, for deliveries, and interior? LEHMKUHL: It’s possible. But no one’s cracked the code yet on how to do it profitably. The last mile for food — from the store or warehouse to the home — is a wildly complicated logistics exercise. It requires quality, delivery accuracy, and timing. Temperature control is also very difficult, and so is security, particularly when people aren’t home. Will homeowners really give Whole Foods the key to their kingdom? And labor will be another challenge. It’s not easy to find employees who will pick the right length of celery, bag it the right way, and combine it with the right amount of parsley. S+B: Is labor already a challenge for your industry? LEHMKUHL: It’s a major challenge. We have almost 8,000 employees now and we’re growing all the time. But no one wants to be a warehouse worker when they grow up. Even fewer people want to work in a 20-below-zero ice cream storeroom. The turnover in our industry is staggering. In 2017, we shifted our focus to retention. Our chief operating officer said to the head of HR, “We’re not getting enough people.” And the HR head replied, “I’ve gotten you 1,600 so far this year. What did you do with them?” The retention challenge drives two things. First, we try to be very people-oriented as managers, in how we recruit people, treat them, pay them, and help them manage their time off. We do everything we can to keep them happy, because there aren’t many replacements. Second, we’re exploring automation. With the acquisition of Partner Logistics in Europe in 2017, we’ve become the largest temp-controlled automated warehousing company on the planet. We are innovating in every possible way to continue to keep that leadership position. S+B: For example? LEHMKUHL: Our buildings in Europe have 550,000 pallet positions. Most of them are automated. In our Bergen op Zoom facility in the Netherlands, there’s a conveyor that takes each pick right from the truck, checks the quality, checks the SKUs, and then puts it away with little or no manual intervention. Automation also lets us build taller, more sustainable warehouses that use less energy and less land. You can store things more densely because you don’t need the space for forklifts. S+B: To what extent do you use AI and data analytics? LEHMKUHL: One of the most interesting aspects of our business is the convergence of the traditional supply chain, warehousing capability, and information technology. We have a team of engineers, applied scientists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, data scientists, and simulation engineers all nested together in Silicon Valley. Their purpose is to reimagine the food supply chain. Being environmentally sustainable is extremely important to us and our customers. It means a lot to our team members, especially the younger generation. So we have been doing work with energy conservation, like insulation and LED lighting, for a long time. We temperature-control the equivalent of over 40,000 homes in our network. Our electric bill would cover every house in Scottsdale, Arizona. When we set up this Silicon Valley group, we went further. Most of our rooms can now operate at adjustable temperatures, with up to 2,000 real-time IoT sensors in a single building. Through the software displays, we can see exactly how our rooms interact with the environment. When it gets hot, we know what part of the room is hottest, and we know which are slow or fast to cool. If someone leaves a freezer door open, we see the leakage immediately. We have also set up a machine-learning proprietary algorithm to show how each building interacts with its environment. We use this algorithm to control our engine rooms. A temperature-controlled warehouse is like a very large, expensive air conditioner; the engine rooms are about nine times the size of a typical conference room, and they use a lot of energy. We use National Weather Service data to forecast the next few days, and we’ve built algorithms that analyze the utility tables and calculate what they are going to charge us. The system knows that in central Washington State, the utility may pay us to run our engine room at 4 a.m. In Southern California in mid-afternoon, the charges can be 3,000 percent higher than at dawn. The algorithms optimize when the engine room gets turned on and when it gets turned off. For instance, if it’s in Southern California, and it is controlling a room cold enough to keep frozen pizza at the customer’s specified temperature to ensure food safety compliance, it doesn’t need to be running all day; it can turn on at midnight, run through 3 in the afternoon, and then shut off for the next nine hours, when there are peak utility rates, and the room will still stay cold enough. S+B: Can you use this kind of optimization to improve the shelf life of perishable products, such as fish or fruit? LEHMKUHL: Yes. Keeping every product at its optimal temperature throughout the supply chain is the number one way to do this. And in traditional temp-controlled supply chains, that didn’t happen. In China, the ice cream is fully thawed and refrozen as many as seven times before it is eaten. We have an applied sciences team that works on innovations to address this problem. For example, one of our customers in central California, a major producer of strawberries, had a bumper crop three years ago. Typically, we blast-freeze strawberries, running negative 20 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit air through them, and then store them for thawing before their ultimate distribution to the market. But there were too many strawberries for our blast-freezing capacity. So literally over a weekend, we sent our applied sciences team into the building to find a solution. Otherwise, the customer would have had to waste the strawberries or juice them. We created simulations of the freezing process, which hadn’t changed much since the 1950s, showing how the physical packaging interacted with the airflow. We used CFD formulas like those previously used by Boeing to model airplane lift. By working with customers to redesign the packaging and the process, we took the blast-freezing time down by 40 percent, increasing blast throughput. The new system also used significantly less energy. S+B: What other opportunities have come up around sustainability? LEHMKUHL: When I first came to this company and met with the top 20 clients, their number one concern was the lack of warehouse space. But building new buildings can be time consuming and requires intense coordination with customers. Moreover, with 100 different clients with different seasonality and packaging sizes, requiring four or five different temperatures in the same building, it’s very difficult to optimize physical space. We asked our applied scientists to look at this problem. They went into the warehouse with light detection and radar (LIDAR) technology, which is used for positioning autonomous vehicles, and they modeled the exact configuration of the room, down to the light switches and pipes. Now that we had a model of supply, we had to understand demand. So we looked at three years of logistics data for one warehouse, and saw the peaks of different types of pallet characteristics. To model maximizing the physical space, we borrowed algorithms from the computer server industry; if you think about data farms, they’re hit by airlines at certain times, by banks at other times, and they’re always trying to maximize the capacity of a server. The problem is similar for warehouses. Once we had an optimal design, we asked our simulation engineers to error-proof it. We now have displays showing the physical pallets coming in and out of the room. We then did this for another 20 buildings. In 36 months, by using data to revise our logistics, temperature control, and energy practices, we found the equivalent of 600,000 square feet of new capacity in our existing real estate. It would have cost us $50 million more to build a new structure that size. And customers were thrilled because they got the space in three months instead of two years or more. S+B: Do any other threats or external issues concern you? LEHMKUHL: Sure. Along with our customers, we follow the news about trade barriers closely. The core problem is uncertainty. Many of the large protein producers — companies like Cargill, JBS, Tyson, Purdue, Smithfield, Bob Evans, and many more — are reaching global markets; in fact, American food is generally regarded as superior. But as tariffs change, our customers have to switch their export strategy on the fly, say from China to Africa and the Middle East. Fortunately, most of them have the capability to do this. They already know how to penetrate global markets and deliver high-quality product to them. So it probably won’t change the competitive dynamic. Small producers may be wondering how to get their products into all of these new countries, but most already know how. S+B: It seems as if the world has progressed over the past few decades in its ability to avoid or manage famines. Does that reflect the way logistics for food evolved over the years? LEHMKUHL: To some extent, the world has progressed. But sadly, maybe it’s become more desensitized as well. Even here in the U.S., which is one of the best countries for preventing food waste, there’s still a long way to go. Our company is partnering with Feeding America, the largest food charitable organization in the U.S., as a way to manage food donations from our system. “In 36 months, by using data to revise our logistics, temperature control, and energy practices, we found the equivalent of 600,000 square feet of new capacity in our existing real estate.” We ultimately see ourselves serving a higher purpose in eliminating waste and feeding the world. There is still a great deal to do in developing markets — in China, for example. If you took all the temperature-controlled facilities in the U.S., flew them to China, and dropped them there, there would still be a shortage of temp-controlled space. Members of the emerging middle class do not want their children to eat the chicken hanging in the market anymore. The demand for high-quality process and temperature control in Asia is unbelievable. That may be an opportunity for us in the future, but we still have plenty of innovation and growth opportunities here. And that’s central to my thinking. Demand for fresh food is growing at about 3.2 percent a year and demand for frozen’s growing at about 4.5 percent. Millennials are more accepting of high-quality frozen food that often locks in nutrients better than fresh does. When we optimize the supply chain, it helps those trends happen, and allows you to eat the food that you want to eat any time of year, even if it was caught or killed or grown in an off season. Salmon from certain markets may be caught only once a year, for example, but people can eat it all year long. S+B: So food may be local but logistics is global. LEHMKUHL: That’s fair. Yes, I like that. S+B: How else do you see artificial intelligence affecting the food business? LEHMKUHL: Our company has visibility to more than $35 billion per year in transportation spend. We have access to a war chest of data: for example, where trucks are going, if they’re full, who the carrier is, and whether they’re on time. We are working diligently to create a machine-learning product that will be able to optimize the system on the fly. If a carrier is late at Walmart, we’ll know immediately why, and work to resolve the situation in real time. This can take an amazing amount of waste out of the food chain. Currently, as much as 50 percent of food truck capacity is not used; either a truck’s not full or it’s coming back empty. We have an opportunity to make a giant impact on that. We’re also launching an app to manage this. It will be like an Uber app for food logistics; you’ll be able to see where any item is going, whether the truck’s full, and how to reorient the truck if need be. This will create greater efficiencies in transportation costs for our customers. We’re also using artificial intelligence inside the warehouse. We’re putting stereoscopic cameras on forklifts, and making them more autonomous. Today, forklift operators spend as much as 50 percent of their miles in subzero temperature. That’s a very tough environment for our team members. With machine learning, we’ll be able to give them step-by-step forklift routes that have the potential to cut operators’ time in the freezer in half. S+B: How do you think AI will affect society? LEHMKUHL: We’re very bullish about AI. It’s helping us be more sustainable and efficient, utilize our buildings better, and keep food safer — all our key objectives. S+B: Does this suggest that, in general, people around the world will have better nutrition for less cost in the future than they do today? LEHMKUHL: I think it’s likely. As the world’s middle class keeps growing, and infrastructure continues to improve, there will be more food available to people at lower cost and higher quality. But I don’t think the supply chain for fresh and frozen food will ever be taken for granted. Too much goes into it.

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Really excited to share today's interview with Cameron Manesh of Cameron's Seafood, a brand that sells and shipped cooked Maryland crabs all over the US.Cameron is a long time redditor too!Some stats:Product: Maryland crabs.Revenue/mo: $175,000Started: July 2017Location: Rockville, MarylandFounders: 2Employees: 6Gross Margins: 15% to 35%Average order size: $165Cost of goods: 47%Customer acquisition cost: $45Email subscribers: 21,000and many more metrics (read below)Hello! Who are you and what are you working on?My name is Cameron and I am the name and co-founder behind Cameron’s Seafood. We catch, cook, chill, pack, and ship Maryland Crabs and crab cakes to your doorstep (to all 50 states) on a date you choose. Our food is made daily and shipped fresh, not frozen in less than 24 hours.We started home delivery in June, 2017. We are leveraging my family’s 33 year old Maryland seafood retail carry out business. We have 11 stores, 3 food trucks, wholesale division, crabers, and have quietly become the largest Maryland seafood company in the world doing over $20,000,000 per year with over 1,000,000 customers per year. But that’s my uncles company. I’m the second generation who is adding recommence and technology to an old school business that has a competitive advantage and high barriers to entry market.Maryland Crabs from the Chesapeake Bay are the best tasting crabs in the world because the cold weather in the Chesapeake Bay makes the crabs hyperbate for months. During that time, their meat gains a layer of fat which gives them a sweet, buttery flavor no other blue crabs have! They are truly special and we own the largest Chesapeake Bay crabbing network in the world!A little more about us and what we do:We offer the highest quality seafood with free shipping and low prices.We maintain 5-star ratings and focus hard on customer service.Our Flagship product: #1 Male Maryland Crabs (Large, heavy Maryland crabs)We have 10 simplified seafood categoriesOur customers are displaced Marylanders, gift givers, and Maryland Crab fans in the 35-90 year olds range that make over $50,000 per year.Unless you live within an hour of the Chesapeake Bay it’s too inconvenient, heavy (bushel weighs 40 lbs), and stinky to find drive and sit in traffic.Most competitors sell blue crabs not from the Chesapeake Bay at high prices.Our average sale is $165.In July, 2018 we made $200,000 and are on pace for $2,400,000 in really the first year.I work 20 hours per week on the business because I am the President of [Ideal Realty Group](www.idealrealty.com), a prominent Apartment brokerage in Maryland, DC and VA.I love taking old businesses and adding technology to help them reach their potential. My cousin and I run the home delivery business and plan to hit $20,000,000 by year 3.What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?My father invested in the first retail seafood location in 1985 and my uncle ran it. My father and I built our Apartment Brokerage while my uncle and his son built what is now the largest retail Maryland crab company in the world.My cousin, Pey, and I are second generation and we wanted to ship Maryland Crabs from the Chesapeake Bay to people who can’t get them real thing, nationwide.One morning, a crab-lover from West Virginia rolled up to one of our family-owned food trucks in Hagerstown, MD, to buy a bushel of Maryland blue crabs. He told my cousin Pey, who was working on the food truck that day, that he was so sick of paying exorbitant prices for dodgy crabs in WV, and to him it was worth driving 6 hours, round trip, to come get the real Maryland crabs from us.This is what got me excited because I had been asking Pey to invest in some food truck chains. He said that with my background I should be thinking of investing in national home delivery. I liked that home delivery was ubiquitous and we had a competitive advantage when it came to sourcing Maryland Crabs. I started looking at FedEx ground zones and realized I could get crabs shipped to their doors in 8 hours but it would cost more money.Instead of guessing, we started asking our customers and they loved the idea not just personally but to gift to their family and friends. Within weeks, we had launched a brand new website with an online store and started shipping our family’s products to blue-crab junkies and seafood-lovers across North America! We knew nothing about ecommerce so we had to learn everything on the fly.I had started several companies in the past, but one one was profitable. However, they were invaluable because only when you fail can you learn. My other projects included:64-computer internet cafe while a Sophomore in college (I received 33 college credits!)Change-elimination from cash transactions patent and software companyLarge apartment brokerage in MD, DC, and VAI funded this project with about $50,000. You don’t need venture capital to grow. It’s about being smart with marketing and partnering with companies or influencers who have existing customer bases to grow lean.We launched with a "minimum viable product" and listed to customers. This aloud us to pivot our business model, shipping model, pricing, offerings and such without investing too much money or wasting our team’s time.Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product.We buy our product from our retail stores, who catch the crabs every morning. Mother nature creates our product in the Chesapeake Bay.We were lucky to leverage upon an existing 33 year old family-owned seafood business. We have 16 crabbers and a fleet of third parties as the stores go through about 75,000 bushels of crabs per year, which is probably more than all of our combined Maryland competitors. We have access to over 100 SKUs from our store but we received valuable feedback from an indirect competitor to keep our site clean and non-confusing.ManufacturingYou can’t manufacture crabs nor do they come in one size. These are living, breathing animals that will pinch hard! Buying seafood requires long-term relationships. Everyone wants to sell crabs around summer holidays (4th of July, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day) when everyone else wants them.But who does the crabber give them to? Us, because we give them work 365 days per year. This business cannot be entered in with tons of money. It has high barriers to entry that requires leverage to grow and I recognized this opportunity looking from the outside in. My family is so busy handling 1,000,000 customers every year and frankly they have money and got a little lazy.What’s special about Maryland Crabs?To survive winter, Chesapeake Bay crabs have to build up extra fat stores which gives them that sweet, buttery flavor you won’t find in other types of crabs or in blue crabs from other waters.This is our competitive advantage - no one can harvest them to support national demand like Cameron’s Seafood can. I saw it as a "low hanging fruit" opportunity that I knew was 100% going to be successful. Crabs are sexy things to sell and we are the largest company that has access to the best tasting crabs in the world!Packaging / Gel PacksShipping heavy perishables is about the hardest and most expensive thing. You have to send heavy products in 1-2 days while keeping the temperature between 34-41 degrees during the summer when heat can breach 100 degrees.We decided early on to ship fresh and have always handmade our food each morning. To ship fresh means using gel packs not dry ice. The first test shipments were to friends and family across the US. Our gel packs kept arriving melted so we kept adding gel packs (industry standard is ⅓ gel pack-to-product-ratio but we were using a 50% ratio and still having problems.I remember my heart dropping in my chest. We didn’t have enough freezer space to chill gel packs for 5 weeks. I didn’t have the money to be in the cold storage business. I thought we were screwed. I started doing research. I knew we weren’t the first company to ship perishables. I contacted Blue Apron and Hello Fresh and within 24 hours I found out they buy pre-frozen gel packs - problem solved!Some seafood like Alaskan King and Snow Crab arrive frozen so we use dry ice. We also add dry ice on some two-day transits and based on the shipping state’s temperature. (I’m looking at your Florida).Boxes / Insulated CoolersWhen Amazon ships me multiple products they shove them into the smallest possible spaces because "Fedex and UPS charge you the higher of the package weight or dimensional weight (DIM) of the box. Dim weight is calculated by LxWxH / 139."After looking at our first 100 shipments I realized we were getting DIM weighted on 85% of packages meaning our boxes were too large. It took me 3 months to find the perfect supplier and figure out how to store them or pick them up within one hour. My family has a large house with 4-car garage. I’m the oldest of 6 kids and we have all moved out so the space was wide open.I did try non-EPF (styrofoam) coolers that are more "green" but they were much more expensive and in startup mode you need to cut expenses. We sent test packages to FedEx who tested them for free and we deduced that EPF were most coolant efficient and cost effective. I figured since we weren’t doing weekly subscriptions it wouldn’t be a problem.After our tests we decided on thisSome initial startup costs and tasks included:Creating the website my wife designed (thanks Mimi)Arranging shipping carriersBuying and storing packaging materials like insulated coolersDry iceFrozen gel packsLabelsBagsProduct inserts.My cousin Pey originally did all the fulfillment but we quickly grew and now have five full time employees. We already had the food licenses, state health inspection permits, and insurance from our retail stores. We don’t have food dead loss because the stores sell what we don’t.Describe the process of launching the online store/business.We had never created an e-commerce site. I had no ecommerce marketing experience and I only lurk on social media.For our website platform we looked at Wix and Volusion but they weren’t robust. We started googling online fish companies and found one that looked clean. The footer had the name of the website developer. We contacted them and told them my wife is smart, young and willing to learn how to create a website. They consulted us in exchange for crabs. They advised us to use WooCommerce.My wife is really the brains behind our website, emails, and customer service. Honestly, none of us would be here today without her. We joke that she is responsible for 90% of the success. She’s a perfectionist that genuinely cares. I could NEVER afford to hire someone like this. My guess is she has saved the company a solid $100,000 in the first 6 months.I started documenting our startup launch on reddit and received really good feedback about our pricing (as it pertained to shipping and a first-time-customer sampler).Our competitors charge for shipping but I knew Amazon has trained all of us that Free Shipping is the standard. Psychologically, customers would rather you bake it into the price then charge them a fee. It’s hard to ship from Maryland to California and have a set of rules that applies to everyone without losing money on some orders.Maybe one day we will get a fulfillment center in Kansas so we can hit every state with 2-day ground shipping. 48 hours is the maximum time you can push for fresh food shipping. We have toyed with flash freezing all items but we feel there is an appreciable loss to the taste and consistency of crabs.FedEx/UPSWhen you start you don’t have volume so it’s hard to negotiate from a position of strength. It’s hard to pin FedEx against UPS against each other because you are asking them to fight to win peanuts and if you can’t hit your minimums their introductory pricing will kill your margins. The answer is find an association that has volume and discounted shipping. We chose FedEx for these reasons:Their association rates were cheaper than UPSThey cover more ground zip codes than UPS (from our east coast fulfillment center)Their saturday ground network was vastly larger, and most of our customers wanted crabs on the weekendsBoth companies try to get you to take insurance but don’t. You’ll never use it and when you do you will spend more money on coverage than recovering money. They also require a daunting amount of information that your carrier won’t supply. It’s an annoying money pit.You should aim for <3% Fedex shipping issues and <1% internal fulfillment issues.The Launch & Customer RetentionWe launched on June 24th, 2017. Our first sale was five packs of our signature seasoning and you can’t imagine how excited we were to hear the phone ding!! After the launch we thought we could tap into our existing retail customer base.The problem was that our store prices are so low (we operate on volume like Walmart) and customers didn’t want to pay for shipping and packaging. We did set up tablets to collect emails so they can gift their friends. I remember sitting there thinking we need to tap into people that moved from Maryland that cannot get the crabs and people that wanted the convenience of home delivery. Remember, unless you get Maryland Crabs from the Chesapeake Bay they will have no taste and will cost as much as the real deal.The biggest challenges were and still are customer acquisition cost effectiveness and marketing. We asked our customers for feedback and analyzed all our orders. There were about 15% repeat orders, which we thought was low but a huge amount of customers were sending our Maryland Seafood as gifs for holidays, birthdays, and parties in addition to diner surprises.As a result, we added a hand-written gift messages and created a Gift Tab. We learned millenials were not our main customer but older people with large incomes. Our demographics are 60% females aged 35-90. I tried picturing my target customer and gave her the name "Sally". Where does Sally shop, what social network (if any) does she use? Where does she read? What TV and radio stations does she like?We learned that Facebook worked the best. Instagram was OK and eventually that generation will be our target demographic, but, who knows how long Instagram will be around... No one cares for seafood on Twitter. Today, we are focusing on YouTube. Crabs are a sexy seafood and people love seeing them and feeling like they are part of your inner workings so we will give them that.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Honestly, the Blue Apron and Hello Freshs’ of the world have taught people it’s ok to receive fresh food delivered to your doorstep so that has been HUGE.During our first 3 months all we heard were crickets. Customer’s weren’t finding us online. Our site was not SEO optimized and we didn’t know how to handle PPC ads. We weren’t prepared with a marketing plan and that was a mistake. I waited too long to hire a marketing specialist and it’s my biggest regret.Initial PRI started calling all the large newspapers pitching their food critics, their startup business writers and even pitched the angle of immigrant-run companies. My first hit was with the New York Times. "I googled “New York Times Food" and learned Florence Fabricant was their critic. I then googled “Florence Fabricant email” and asked her to sample our food.”I read she is a stern critic so we were worried but to our surprise, she loved the food and when the article came out we did close to $40,000 in sales in three days and could barely handle the volume. That was an intense week but made it happen. We did the same with The Washington Post , Forbes, Bethesda Magazine and Baltimore Business Journal. This has been our best marketing to date but it can only go so far.Here is the EXACT EMAIL I used to contact the food critic at the New York TimesSubject: A story of two cousins who founded Cameron’s Seafood, Maryland largest Maryland Blue Crab and Crab Cake provider now ships nationwideHi Florence,I own Cameron's Seafood Market, the largest seller of Maryland Blue Crabs and Crab Cakes since 1985. We just started shipping nationwide and I need some help spreading the word. Here is a PR link for some reference: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/camerons-seafood-now-shipping-nationwide-300481057.htmlMy thought is to have you do a piece on our food. I can ship you some samples. Let me know if interested!It worked and it generated more money, at full margins, than anything else we have done to date.To contact the press, I recommend targeting macro press (i.e. USA Today). To locate the right contact google your indirect competitors or other vertical companies (i.e. Hello Fresh) to see who wrote their articles. Google the writer’s contact information and send an email introducing your company. Offer them samples. Know who you are contacting. If they are in foodies discuss your food. If the New York Times didn’t respond to my email I would have contacted their small business contacts and pitched a "startup food delivery business" story with a focus on the the business model and business plan. If one door shuts just open another until you have results. I used Google Docs to list all my contacts and I keep notes and monitor when I last followed up.Google / Facebook / BingThese still give us about half of all our traffic. We worked with a specialist to get our ads performing at 400% ROI and maintain that level. However, since our profit margins are low it’s hard to justify a growth strategy using PPC so we cut it from 20% to 10% of our gross revenue.SEOWe hired a third-party company to handle our SEO. Our organic traffic is about 30% and that number is growing. But you know, SEO is key to lowering your customer acquisition cost. Blue apron is at $250 while we are at $45.Email MarketingThis provides a very strong ROI. About 6 months into the business we revamped our entire site to focus on two actions: collect emails and purchase seafood. We have seen a 400% growth in emails in just 90 days. We are currently at 22,000 emails. Email is 7% of our traffic. I spoke to an indirect competitor who convinced me to focus on marketing. During that call I realized we had missed a huge opportunity with our 1,000,000 annual customers. We weren’t collecting emails and they were already customers. Think about how many out-of-state family they have that could be receiving crabs as gifts. I bought Kindle Fires (they are $50 so even if employees or customs stewal them it’s no big deal) and installed them at all 14 POS. When you provide your email you get a few dollars off that day’s retail meal. It was an immediate success! Online, I made sure each page had one or more places to collect emails.We had a pop-up on that offered $10 off but it only had a 1.67% conversion rate so we switched to a wheel game, which allows you to enter an email to win 5%, 10%, $20, and a bushel of crabs. This literally has 10x our signups to 10.67%! If you look at our site www.cameron's seafood.com you will notice we have four places that try to collect your email. We even have the home message that states "ENTER YOUR INFO TO SEE IF WE SERVE YOUR AREA."We love using Gleam.io giveaways with influencers and indirect competitors to grow our emails. I know the above recommendations work but this is too clever. To win our prizes you have to enter your email. To get more chances to win you have to take actions like visiting a page or inviting friends (who enter their email) to join. Last week we had a campaign generate 1,600 emails in one day! You have to state in your rules that all entrants agree to let you email them.InfluencersThey provide access to existing niche customer bases. We find them on Instagram and Youtube. We provide them free food, give them $20 per sale, and sponsor giveaways to their audiences.You want to target macro-influencers in your field not just famous people with huge followers that will result in low conversion rates. 5% conversions are possible if you do it right. For example, a Keto diet macro influencer with 250,000 followers will have a dramatically higher conversion rate for us vs. a rapper with 5,000,000 followers.PartnershipsYour product may compliment another. For example, Old Bay Seasoning compliments Maryland Crabs so it’s natural that we try to arrange a partnership to tap into each other's’ customers.We don’t sell on Amazon or wholesale to big box retailers yet but are exploring that possibility. Honestly, we aren’t set up for the demand they would create so we need to expand.This winter, we plan to expand our fulfillment center. Amazon is a great idea even if they take 15% because that’s a marketing expense. You should have 15% to 20% set aside for a marketing budget in a startup.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?Sice I run an apartment brokerage "I spend my nights and weekends working on the business growth and my goal is to create of system for each of our daily tasks so simple a monkey could do them. If you have the funds then hire and delegate all the menial tasks you can so you can focus on top-line growth. If you don’t have the money then work your butt off.We hit profitability a few days ago and are super excited!Quick Facts:Gross Margins: 15% to 35% on $165 average ordersCost of goods: 47%, which seems high but we sell premium-grade seafood. What would you rather sell 1) hot dogs at 80% gross margin for $1.50 profit per or, 2) On crab order at 20% margin at $40 profit?Customer acquisition costs: $45Ad costs: 20% of revenue. We will dial it back to 15% once we hit a critical mass of customers.Repeat Orders: 17%Monthly traffic: 85,000 hits a month. We took over www.cameronsseafood.com after it was 10-years old. IT had about 25,000 hits per month already.Avg time on page: 66 secondsConversion rate: 1.1%Email subscribers: 21,000Social media engagement: 9,100 Facebook and 10,600 on InstagramDistributionOur fulfillment center is literally inside our retail HQ in Rockville, Maryland. We arrive at 5am to hand-make the crabcakes and crab soups from that mornings crab catch. We steam and chill the crabs, which can take 3-6 hours to properly cool and reduce internal moisture. 100% of our sales are from cameronsseafood.com.Since we have 30 foot ceilings and about 1,000 SF we have room to expand by building an upper level. It sucks carrying boxes and food upstairs for the packaging but we have to get them done every day before FedEx arrives with their truck. Because we let customers choose their delivery date we always know the minimum orders we have to prepare for tomorrow and ground packages must be dropped off by 6pm or the package is won’t arrive on the proper date. It gets hectic with 3pm order cut-off times.New Fulfillment CenterWe plan to build a new fulfillment center in a warehouse a few miles away. We will finally have multiple loading docks and everything one one floor...no more stairs! I looked into outsourcing the food prep but our business is particularly labor intensive and requires specific training. For example, we have to catch the crabs from the Chesapeake Bay and drive them to our stores early. 15% die during. Then we sort/grade by size and gender. Third-parties want to automate everything and aren’t set up for our niche.We are noticing local Marylanders buy online as opposed to driving to our 14 locations which make us think hot-food home delivery within a 60 mile radius has merit. We are monitoring retpeat orders to see if the customers demand a subscription model. We aren’t doing wholesale at the moment but we have meetings set up with Costco for our crab cakes.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?A couple things have really stuck with me:Focus on customer service.If you focus on the customer and customer service you will have viral growth. You want long-term customer relationships with a focus on 5-star service so they tell their friends. Word-of-mouth is the best type of marketing.No matter what our SEO or marketing says the bottom line is Amazon has taught people to read reviews. We have the only cash refund or reship policy in our industry. We really care! Call us and we would help you order a pizza.No matter what our SEO or marketing says the bottom line is Amazon has taught people to read reviewsSimple, focused web site design.A focused message and easy customer experience is key. Don’t try to do too much at once. Don’t confuse customers. If you have a lot of products organize them well.Get creative with your marketingTry contacting influencers to grow your email base because emails can be your highest marketing ROI. Give them free products and have them blog or youtube about them. Offer giveaways to their audiences. Give them money for sales they generate and try to get 12-month commitments.Your website should have an SEO focus because that’s how people search for new products. Third-party reviews are your marketing proof so make sure to respond to all reviews and work on 5-star ratings.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Website: WordPressE-commerce: WooCommerceShipping: ShipstationEmail design: CanvaEmail campaigns: MailChimpShare-a-refund: Automatically files FedEx claims.Credit card payment processing: HeartlandPhone tracking: Call RailGoogle AnalyticsProductiving: Google SuiteAccounting: Quickbooks OnlineReviews: TrustpilotGiveaways: Gleam.ioGoogle Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook AdsReferral Network: AvantlinkWhat have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?I’m a big Kindle reader and Audible guy (my car is a library on wheels). Favorite books:Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and PurposeSam Walton: Made in AmericaThe Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of AmazonAdvice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Beginning a new business can be scary but just start small but work on it obsessively. Immerse yourself in your chosen field - try to know more than your competitors and focus on getting a minimum viable product out the door as fast and inexpensive as possible to get customer feedback. Then pivot and repeat. If your startup takes more than 3 years to be profitable consider it a hobby and move on.If your startup takes more than 3 years to be profitable consider it a hobby and move on.Do everything yourself at first and put in 90 hour work weeks. Once you set up the basics work on creating systems for each facet of your business - fulfillment, sales, marketing, automation, even accounting. Everything.Create the ability for growth on day 1. Create a well oiled machine that makes you money while you sleep. Can you build a business without fundraising? If so, what is your customer acquisition plan? Are there competing examples of success stories that you can follow so you don’t have to recreate the wheel?Most successful companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a customer acquisition strategy including how they market. You can stalk them and follow their footsteps for free because success is copyable and your startup likely isn’t taking us to Mars. You don’t have to have the best product or service but you have to be better prepared than your competitors.Find your indirect and direct competitor and order from all of them. Reverse engineer what they do but do it better, cheaper and with better customer service. Find their pitfalls and don’t repeat their mistakes. For example, I contacted Hello Fresh and visited their headquarters. I ordered their food. I learned how they ship. What gel packs they use. What box manufacturer they use. How they market and this information was free and really fun to learn. They raised money to grow so I challenged myself to do it without public funding and it’s working.I think too many entrepreneurs delay their product and website release because they think people will steal their idea but in reality nobody has the time nor do they care about your idea.Keep reading! Most people stop reading after college but does learning magically end then? NO! Look at wealthy people they all read. If you hate reading get audible or watch youtube videos.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?We are hiring!Influencer marketer to help grow our emailsMarketing specialist to create partnerships with complementary businesses with an established customer base (ie.e Old Bay Seasoning)Blog and recipe writersThese are paid positions but they can also be unpaid interns. All the above are full-time, paid positions with tons of room for growth but we also are hiring unpaid interns. You can do this job with an internet connection, a phone, and passion. We don’t care where you live as long as you are a good communicator.Where can we go to learn more?[www.cameronsseafood.com](www.cameronsseafood.com)Our FacebookYouTube ChannelTwitter: @OrderCamerons[Email us at [email protected]!](mailto:[email protected])Liked this interview? Check out more founders that shared their story on StarterStory.com.

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the-fitsquad · 6 years

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Thin Customers

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QMP style and manufacture to the highest common a wide assortment of Workstations. The HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter assists copy shops respond to these demands. The Software Licensing Service reported that the item essential does not match the item key for the license. The Konecranes XA and XM workstation crane systems are developed to meet the varied and demanding requirements of workstations and production lines that need up to 2,000 kg of lifting capacity. ECC Memory is an optional feature accessible with Intel® Xeon configurations. The smallest of HP’s new complete size desktop workstations is the Z4. As opposed to its siblings, the Z4 is a single-processor machine that makes use of Intel’s new Xeon W processors instead of the more pricey socket 3647 models. Software engineers are not truly in require of mobile workstations, unless they are operating on software program that recreates a 3D atmosphere (or 2D CAD files with a lot of entities).

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gta-5-cheats · 6 years

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Dell Inspiron 15 5575 Review

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/dell-inspiron-15-5575-review/

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 Review

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Shortly after Intel announced the first of its 8th gen core CPUs back in August, AMD unveiled its new Ryzen Mobile series. Thanks to both companies increasing core counts across various product lines, we’re seeing big performance improvements over last year’s laptops. Intel’s dominance in this space is being challenged for the first time in years.

With just four models out right now, these new CPUs are built using AMD’s ‘Zen’ CPU cores and feature integrated graphics based on the recently launched Vega architecture. Intel’s new 8th gen CPUs have proven to have strong compute performance, but integrated graphics has never been the company’s strong suit, especially when it comes to gaming. This is the main area in which AMD hopes to have the upper hand. There are a couple of laptops already in the market with AMD CPUs, and today, we’ll be reviewing one from Dell’s recently launched Inspiron 15 5575 series.

This series is currently available with Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 CPUs, and you have various options in terms of colours, display resolutions, and RAM. Our review unit today is the top-end SKU in the series, according to Dell India’s website. It features an AMD Ryzen 5 CPU and is priced at Rs. 50,690. Let’s see if AMD’s technology has the chops to challenge the Intel stronghold.

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 design

The Inspiron 15 5575 is a pretty basic-looking laptop. Dell has given the plastic parts a metallic finish but once you hold it, it’s easy to tell that it’s not real aluminium. The build quality is quite solid though, and the body of the laptop doesn’t flex easily even if you apply pressure. It feels as though it will be durable enough for long-term usage. On its website, Dell advertises a host of different colour options for the 5575, but at the time of this review, our particular variant was only on sale in a Licorice Black trim. The silver unit that we received doesn’t look bad, but it does seem a bit bland.

The lid offers good protection to the 15.6-inch LCD screen. The resolution is decently high at 1920×1080, and the edges of text and icons don’t appear overly jagged. There’s also an anti-glare coating so reflections aren’t much of an issue. However, the panel used here is clearly not IPS quality, and so viewing angles are poor, and colours are dull. The brightness is sufficient, but at full brightness, whites tend to burn out easily when not viewed head-on. You also get a thick, old-fashioned bezel all around the screen, and a HD webcam in the usual spot.

You get a single hinge in the middle of the display, which also conceals all the vents. This laptop is quite thick, and even with the lid open, the base alone measures 22.7mm in thickness. In order to give it an illusion of slimness, Dell has tapered the sides and front of the laptop a bit.

Connectivity is good, and includes two USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, Ethernet, an SD card slot, a microphone and headphones combo socket, and a DVD writer, which is something we haven’t seen in a long time. There’s only one LED indicator near the power inlet, which glows white when you’re plugged in and amber when the battery is low. What’s missing here is a USB Type-C port.

The palm rest and trackpad are quite spacious, and Dell has managed to fit in a full-sized keyboard complete with a number pad. The chiclet keys are well spaced but aren’t backlit, and we didn’t find the tactile response to be very good either. They’re also quite noisy. The direction keys are nicely separated from the others, and the power button is isolated above the keyboard to avoid accidental presses. However, there’s no fingerprint sensor, even with this top-end configuration. The surface of the trackpad isn’t the smoothest. We found tracking to be a little jumpy at times and gestures don’t always work flawlessly.

On the bottom, you have four rubber feet to help get some clearance. The stereo speakers are also placed at the bottom, towards the front. There’s no hatch for accessing any of the components and the battery isn’t removable either. Overall, the Inspiron 15 5575 isn’t much to look at. It’s built to be utilitarian, and that seems to be the end of it. This laptop isn’t very light either, at 2.5kg, so carrying it around every day won’t be very pleasant.

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 specifications

As we stated earlier, the Inspiron 15 5575 model that we have is powered by a Ryzen 5 2500U CPU, which features four multi-threaded cores, giving you a total of eight threads. The base clock is set at 2GHz but that can be boosted to 3.6GHz, depending on the task at hand. Graphics duties are handled by the integrated Radeon Vega 8 GPU, which has eight compute units and a base clock of 1,100MHz. It also supports AMD’s FreeSync variable refresh rate scheme, when connected to a compatible monitor.

The laptop has 8GB of DDR4 RAM running in dual-channel mode, a 1TB (5400rpm) hard drive, dual band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and a 42WHr battery. You get Windows 10 Home preinstalled, along with Microsoft Office 2016 Home and Student Edition and a 30-day trial of McAfee LiveSafe. Dell also bundles its own software like Dell Recovery Environment, Support Assist, and Dell Mobile Connect. The latter lets you sync your phone to your laptop using Bluetooth, so you can receive calls and check SMS messages directly from your laptop, just like we first saw on the Dell XPS 13 9370.

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 performance and battery life

From the moment you power it on, this laptop doesn’t seem very responsive. This impression persisted with us even days after we set it up. This is most likely because of the slow mechanical hard drive being used. There’s an inherent sense of lag when loading apps or even opening new Windows dialogue boxes. Once your programs are loaded though, things are a bit smoother and even multitasking is quick.

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The Inspiron 15 5575 runs slightly warm. After about an hour of streaming video using Chrome on battery power, we found that the bottom and the area behind the keyboard got rather warm. Thankfully, this didn’t spread to the palm rest area, and the keys and other parts of the laptop stayed cool.

In terms of performance, the Rzyen 5 2500U is best compared to Intel’s new Core i5-8250U. The Ryzen 5 pulled ahead of Intel’s offering in some synthetic tests. In 3DMark Fire Strike, the Inspiron 15 5575 scored 1,639 points, which is roughly 600-700 points more than what a Core i5-8250U laptop would typically achieve. In CPU benchmarks, we’ve seen slightly better results from Intel, both for single and multi-threaded tests. Our real-world file compression and video encoding tests showed that the Ryzen 5 doesn’t quite match the speed of Intel’s counterpart, taking up to a whole minute extra when compressing files and encoding videos.

In games, the integrated Vega8 GPU is an advantage over Intel’s integrated solution. In Rise of The Tomb Raider’s in-built benchmark, we typically get a single-digit with Intel’s Core i5 offerings, with the resolution set to 1080p and the ‘Low’ graphics preset. The Inspiron 15 5575 on the other hand returned 15.7fps with the same settings. The laptop doesn’t get too hot when gaming, which is something we liked. The exhaust fans are audible but they’re not too distracting.

Games downloaded from the Windows store, such as Asphalt 8, ran smoothly. We also tried FarCry 4, which gave us a semi-playable average framerate of 20fps, but only after dropping the resolution to 1600×900 and the graphics to the ‘Low’ preset. We managed to get GTA V running too, and we averaged around 27fps. However, we had to drop the resolution all the way down to 1280×720, with most of the graphics settings either at ’Normal’ or turned off. Finally, we were able to get a smooth 30+ frames per second in DOTA 2 at the native resolution, and with the graphics slider pushed all the way to the right for best quality.

The Dell Inspiron 15 5575 has no trouble playing 4K video files, although it’s hard to truly enjoy media due to the lacklustre display. Audio quality is decent but not great. Even with the MaxxAudioPro enhancement, audio sounds a bit hollow. On the bright side, the volume level gets quite loud.

Battery life is disappointing, as the 3-cell battery only managed to deliver about four hours of runtime on a single charge. This was with light to medium usage, which typically involved using Chrome and watching videos. In Battery Eater Pro, the laptop ran for just 1 hour, 36 minutes, which isn’t great either.

Verdict The Inspiron 15 5575 series is currently Dell’s only lineup with AMD Ryzen CPUs. The onboard Vega 8 GPU performs quite well for an integrated graphics processor, but is still no replacement for a high-end discrete one. The most expensive variant that we reviewed doesn’t quite suit its Rs. 50,690 asking price, as the overall package leaves a lot to be desired. Windows 10 feels laggy, the display has weak viewing angles and dull colours, battery life is disappointing, and this laptop tends to run warm even on battery power.

The Vega 8 graphics do give AMD an edge over Intel’s integrated solution in most 3D games, but if that’s all you’re after, then Acer’s Swift 3 with this very same configuration, looks a lot better at an online price of roughly Rs. 43,000. You lose out on the DVD drive and Ethernet port (which aren’t a huge loss for many people), but in place of that, you do get a Type-C port, backlit keyboard, and a fingerprint sensor.

If you’re looking for better gaming performance but don’t have the budget for a high-end laptop, then something like the Acer Aspire 5 A515-51G with an entry-level discrete GPU is still a better bet at the same price level as the Inspiron 15 5575. When we reviewed it, this model with the Nvidia MX150 GPU featured just 4GB of RAM, which was our main gripe, but it seems like there’s now an 8GB RAM option, available for roughly the same price as the Inspiron 15 5575.

The Dell Inspiron 15 5575 is built well, but other than this, it’s hard to think of a good enough reason to buy or recommend it.

Price (MRP): Rs. 50,690

Pros

Sturdy body

Competent integrated GPU

Cons

Lacklustre display

Runs warm

Weak battery life

Sluggish performance

Ratings (Out of 5)

Design: 3

Display: 3

Performance: 3

Software: 4

Value for Money: 3

Overall: 3

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soaibgrewal-blog · 7 years

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A Realist’s Outlook Of The Hardware Game

I’ve recently come across a lot of new hardware startups and thought it may make sense to repost an interview of mine from Inc42 on Hardware in India. Some advice, tips and opinion.

Inc42: What are some of the opportunities for the bubbling Indian hardware ecosystem? Personally, I think companies need to understand how hardware plays a role in a country’s overall market. Making a consumer-centric product for India doesn’t work well in hardware. Instead, I think the real opportunity locally will be in enterprise, SMEs and agritech solutions that have a hardware component core to the service delivery. Many of these solutions will require some degree of hardware and software localisation. Nothing is just hardware anymore, the device is an enabler or a platform for the software. Brad Feld calls this ‘software wrapped in plastic’ and I think that’s the best way to define it. Look at the two major hardware enabled success stories in India – Grey Orange and Ezetap, both of them are integrated solutions.

Inc42: Are you excited by the sector’s potential in India? I truly believe that Indian startups can lead in hardware enabled-solutions (people call this IoT but I hate that term), in particular in the spaces I mentioned earlier. In my opinion hardware ecosystems of the future will require three things to succeed: excellent software engineering, a knowledge of enterprise sales and customer support, and hardware design and manufacturing expertise and infrastructure. I think we are pretty good at the first two and if we can figure out the third component we’re golden. On a personal level, I’m a hardware geek, I studied Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and did some product design work before I started my first company. So as an investor I really want to support exciting hardware companies and get my hands dirty.

Inc42: What’s different in the various funding parameters at different funding stages for hardware startups in comparison to other startups? There is very little funding for pre-prototype companies. You will have to rely on angel and grant money. At this time you need to concentrate on: early validation, getting that working prototype ready, having your financials in order – cost per unit, gross margins, and maybe some pre-orders. You are raising Seed money for inventory, fulfilment, early sales. Most venture investors in India aren’t ready to invest until you’ve had some pre-small batch production and sales. Don’t even think about additional SKU’s (stock keeping units) until you’ve gotten to Series A.

Inc42: How differently do investors perceive hardware startups? Hardware is definitely at a disadvantage in India, I don’t want to sugar coat things. Investors perceive hardware to be more cost intensive – especially upfront pre-launch costs. R&D, prototyping, design for manufacturing, small batch and initial distribution channel development costs add up substantially. This means that in a one to one comparison with software product startups it’s a far riskier bet.

Inc42: What is the best financial planning advice you can give to hardware startups? It’s imperative to understand and break down your pre-production costs. This means understanding the typical failure points in the product development process. Firstly, go get customer feedback and test your product out multiple times at the prototype stage. This isn’t software you can’t expect to get customer validation after you’ve spent money on a custom injection mold die. Second, invest in a good functioning prototype, don’t discount this at all – it helps in communication with manufacturers, customer feedback and getting investors excited. Third, spend time in optimising your BOM (Bill of Material), which means spending enough time assessing correct materials, manufacturing processes and suppliers. Lastly, if it’s the first product and you haven’t yet optimised distribution you need to limit your inventory risk – less is definitely more even if it means taking a hit on your gross margins early on.

Inc42: Hardware funding is at its current peak worldwide, is India a little late to jump on to the bandwagon? Not at all. I don’t think it’s fair to compare Indian sectoral funding to global sectoral funding. Companies that are creating unique solutions will attract funding, we’ve seen it in India as well. I think made-in-India for India consumer solutions will always be at a disadvantage from a fundraising point of view.

Inc42: How important is it for hardware startups to ‘Make in India’? I think in the long run it is definitely important. In the short term I really don’t think Indian startups should worry about this, instead, they should focus on optimising their Bill of Materials, supply chain and unit economics. If that means manufacturing the entire thing in China, that’s perfectly fine. We can’t wait for industry and the government to catch up. Governments are a lagging indicator of innovation. I’m still not convinced that we can compete with other countries in mass consumer manufacturing any time soon, but I think we have a chance at being very competitive at hi-tech manufacturing especially as ancillary industries develop around defence and electronics manufacturing centres.

Inc42: How feasible is it to collaborate with other startups/corporates to make and sell a better hardware product? Globally, very much so. Foxconn operates a ‘Manufacturing Hotel’ in China where hardware startups can access prototyping and manufacturing facilities by the hour or the month depending on their need. PCH runs a very successful hardware accelerator in San Francisco called Highway 1. Their end goal is simple they want to work with these companies early on so they can take care of their manufacturing needs as they grow. We aren’t seeing enough of this in India. I seriously believe manufacturing corporates in India need to step up or they will get left behind and to be honest I won’t be shedding any tears for them.

Inc42: Prototyping seems to be a major challenge in India, what’s your say on the matter? I think the challenge is threefold: knowledge, expertise, and infrastructure. There is a severe knowledge gap. Hardware entrepreneurs are enthusiastic and hungry but need more opportunities to learn the nuances of the prototyping and design process. Secondly, India needs more designers, embedded software engineers, model makers, and design for manufacturing experts. This is a systemic problem, in the short-term, we need to figure out ways to facilitate interaction between existing experts and startups. The last bit – infrastructure is slowly being solved thanks to hardware incubators and maker spaces.

Inc42: Is there a need for specialised hardware startup enablers – including hardware-specific funds, accelerators, peer groups, development marketplaces etc.? Most definitely, hardware needs an ecosystem to flourish. If you look at any flourishing hardware ecosystem, there is an abundance of prototyping spaces, accelerators, incubators and communities. I think we are working towards all of this in India. We definitely need to figure out component sourcing and small batch manufacturing in India. Most manufacturers won’t entertain orders below 1000 pieces, which puts a massive strain on startups.

Inc42: Hardware startups usually require a more diverse core team (front-end, back-end, biz-dev, embedded systems, mechanical, electrical, industrial design, etc.), which cities in India have the potential to supply a good amalgamation of such talent? I think cities with existing manufacturing ecosystems and proximity to the large startup cities will have a serious advantage. In my opinion Bengaluru, Coimbatore, and Pune will have a major advantage. Delhi/NCR has the talent but needs some of the other ecosystem components, that the cities I mentioned before already have.

This interview was originally published on Inc42.

Link to the original article: https://inc42.com/startups/interviews/hardware-interview-soaib/

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